CQC to double inspections of adult care services

Adult social care services would be inspected at least once a year under Care Quality Commission plans to call time on "light-touch" regulation. Currently, services are inspected at least once every two years.

Adult social care services would be inspected at least once a year under Care Quality Commission plans to call time on “light-touch” regulation.

The plan, revealed exclusively to Community Care by CQC chief executive Cynthia Bower, comes on the back of a sharp drop in site visits in the past year, because inspectors were diverted into the regulator’s programme of re-registering all providers.

The shift also follows concerns over the CQC’s ability to protect service users given its failure to follow up on a whistleblower in the Winterbourne View abuse case.

Currently, services are inspected at least once every two years.

Bower said that the CQC had favoured a “proportionate, risk-based, light-touch” approach to regulation – in which services were left uninspected for up to two years in the absence of issues coming to light – but service users, providers and staff favoured more inspections.

“What people want, particularly people who use services, is for us to put our boots on the ground,” she said. “Inspections are a really positive quality assurance for providers.”

This would enable the regulator to increase its complement of inspectors from 855 posts – about 15% of which were lying vacant as of early June – to about 1,000. Bower said she wanted staff to have a “manageable workload”, and also wanted to use more service users and specialist practitioners in inspections.

Bower said the “light-touch” approach sprang from the CQC’s resources – its budget at its inception 2009 was athird less than the three inspectorates it took over from had in 2006 – and the then government’s emphasis on cutting red tape for business.

However, this was compounded by what Bower described as the “dreadful process” of having to re-register 12,000 adult care and independent providers – delivering services from 23,000 locations – under the Health and Social Care Act last year.

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